Adam Hammer

Adam Hammer works for the St Cloud Times at Saint Cloud University as the director of media relations. He takes part in creating their literary magazine. During his presentation he addressed the process of writing articles. He talked about how he receives emails about certain stories and has an editorial process where he can decide what stories to take on. What I found interesting is that he receives a lot of story ideas but he can go out searching for stories opposite of how working for a newspaper worked. He went into detail about how he organizes the stories in an inverted pyramid so that the most interesting stories are at the top of the page. I loved that he went into detail about the writing process because it gave me an idea of how to structure a literary magazine.
I found his presentation very informative because his line of work as a media relations director is along the lines of what I could do with my New Media Major.

Adam Hammer

You can find out more about Adam on his website.

American Idol

The show American Idol is a prime example of converging of technology. The show allows audiences to vote for the winners thus making the show interactive. The website, http://www.americanidol.com/ is set up so the audience cam view the consistence and learn information off their page as well as track their progress in the show. This allows for the audience to keep tabs on their favorite artists and interact with the show. They have behind the scene access to the show that viewers just watching the show on the television are not a part of.

This cultural changes has had a positive impact on the show. Viewers use to rely on watching the show to find out results on their favorite artists but now they can track them through social media. The website directly links Twitter, Facbeook, Gmail, Pinterest, and Instagram. By doing this, viewers can use multiple forms of media to advertise for the same show.

"Bert is Evil"

“From his bedroom, Ignacio sparked an international controversy. His images crisscrossed the world, sometimes on the backs of commercial media, sometimes via grassroots media. And, in the end, he inspired his own cult following.” Page 2

I thought this quote was significant because it depicts how much of a reality one person’s hobby became. Dino Ignacio had an idea to post the image of Bert from Sesame Street with terrorist as a joke claiming that Bert was a part of that terrorist’s attack. His image became popular and were used in protest.

What is most interesting to me is that this became popular and it started from some teenagers bedroom as a joke. 

Convergence of Media

The most recent Disney film, "Frozen" was very successful in box offices and became popular online. People have made parody's of the movies most popular song "Let it go." Pixar and Disney teamed up for this video and sang the song entirely in different characters from different Disney movies. The movie was uploaded to youtube and shared around Facbook, Tumblr, and Pinterest.
The short clip brings popular promotion to "Frozen." Many people have uploaded their versions of the song to Youtube. Some videos were parodies making fun of the song but some fans uploaded videos of themselves singing which brought awareness to the film.
These videos provide advertisement for the movie, thus creating a buzz.